


a stained glass variation of the truth

by embryonic



Category: Person of Interest (TV)
Genre: F/F, Transhumanism, post s5 but it doesnt matter cause canon isn't real, root and shaw are alive but i cant say the same for everyone else, tw feelings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-17
Updated: 2016-07-17
Packaged: 2018-07-24 15:14:44
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,948
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7513118
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/embryonic/pseuds/embryonic
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Root's tired. Shaw and The Machine have a lot more in common than either of them probably cares to admit.</p>
            </blockquote>





	a stained glass variation of the truth

-

She’s in the midst of kneecapping a group of amateur assassins in DC - “Terroists,” Shaw corrects The Machine when she’s given the number, “and shitty ones at that” – when Root comes sauntering in, all _honey, I’m home_ with an actual goddamn sniper rifle and what’s probably a bag full of explosives in her hands.

“She thought you might need some backup,” Root explains, after emptying a round into the chest of the lackey behind Shaw’s back.

Shaw matches Root’s maniacal grin with a smirk of her own as they take down the rest of losers in bomb vests, followed by a brief torture session where she is reminded of how dangerously provocative Root can be with a knife. Root leads them out of the building, bypassing sprays of bullets like its nothing, eyes glinting with something forceful, a god in the shape of a body. And, to be clear, Shaw does not believe in god, never has, but moments like these: she maybe understands what people mean when they use the word devotion.

They catch a cab to the hotel Shaw had checked into and Shaw watches as Root immediately slumps into the seat, losing all of her animation like a balloon deprived of helium.

“Thought you were supposed to be in Tokyo for another week,” Shaw muses after giving the address to the cab driver.

“Mm,” Root sighs, “I have to head back tomorrow. Just needed to make a pit stop in DC to pick up a few things for Her. And, bonus,” she says, moving her hand to Shaw’s thigh, “my favorite torture buddy just so happens to be in town.”

Shaw rolls her eyes slightly, but enjoys the fingers lightly raking up and down her thigh. “Been a while,” she mentions, referring to the near three weeks that have passed since Root has been in New York, having been whisked away to work on some project involving a relevant number at The Machine’s beck and call.

Root moves closer to her at that, lips ghosting over her shoulder, “Miss me?”

Shaw snorts, “Almost as much as I missed sharing a bunker with a group of hygiene-lacking Marines for months on end.”

“I’m touched.”

“You should be.”

Shaw looks at Root, whose head has lolled onto her shoulder, eyes drifting closed. It’s been nearly half a year since they put an end to Samaritan, and there are times like these, quiet moments that make all that had happened, and everything that is real now, seem impossible.

Samaritan is dead, but so is the man who created its assailant; Finch is gone and so is Reese. And in what seems like a cruel joke, the world was left with a broken god trying to piece herself back together with only the help of some pre-recorded tapes and two of the most emotionally bankrupt heroes that no one ever asked for. In certain moments, the idea of Samaritan upgrading the simulations to this level of fucked up complexity is not ruled out – is dizzying, even.

Shaw puts her hand on top of Root’s, reality’s buoy. Root shifts closer to her, winces slightly.

“You good?” Asks Shaw.

Root manages to smile at the concern, but her eyes stay closed as she answers. “’m fine,” She manages. “Just tired. Need a nap before I start packing.”

 

When they pull up to the hotel, Shaw pays for the cab and has to nudge Root awake. She climbs out groggily and Shaw eyes her for wounds – she’s not bleeding or broken, from the looks of it, but she’s exhausted, and Shaw almost has to half-carry her back to the room despite her weak protests that she can’t stay long; her flight leaves early in the morning and she still has some errands to run for Her.

Shaw rolls her eyes. She thinks about the first few months after Samaritan was defeated, when Root had been concerned with the state of The Machine, who’d been piecing herself back together with more glitches than either of them would care to admit. Shaw takes Root’s word that She’s fully functioning now – and if the numbers they’re getting, along with the endless amount of new recruits popping up around the country are anything to go by, it’s true.

 But, she sees Root exerting herself endlessly for Her, and it’s not with the same sort of fanatic bliss at being god incarnate as it had been before. Root lives in a state of constant exhaustion, like she’s an apparatus with no sense of entropy. And, despite knowing that it’s of Root’s own doing for the most part (“we don’t _trust_ anyone else to handle the relevant numbers, sweetie”) Shaw can’t help but think of The Machine – this rebooted one, at least - as a puppet master, sometimes, a god so infinite in scope it can’t possibly be concerned with the technicalities: bodies and hunger and energy; the severity of Root’s emotional capacity.

Shaw, on the other hand, develops a sort of preoccupation with these things - the physical world, at least - the details of things have always been a comfort to her, more so now than ever. After Samaritan, remaining wary of details has been more of a necessity than anything, and every once in a while, Shaw catches herself testing the limits of this reality: the precise weight of a gun in her hand, the feel of the tiny patch of grey fur on Bear’s belly, the exact location of the scars on Root’s body, the shape of them, how they got there. Reality still slips away, sometimes, but she’s got methods of getting it back now. 

When they get to the room, Root falls onto the bed like a rag doll, her long limbs stretched out like wires. The first thing Shaw does is open the laptop and point it toward her.

“Get someone else,” She just says. “Your girl needs a break.”

Root grumbles a rebuttal. Shaw sets the laptop on the desk beside the bed and takes off her shoes, her hoodie caked with someone else’s blood. The Machine must concede pretty quickly because after a moment, Root’s got that faraway look on her face and is saying “wait, sweetie –“ and trying to sit up again. She fails, and the pout directed at Shaw turns into a sigh of defeat as she falls back onto the bed.

Shaw rolls her eyes. She pulls Root’s shoes off then sits on the bed beside her. “Up,” She says, helping Root lift herself so Shaw can pull her dress over her head. Shaw looks for new bruises, wounds Root might not have noticed, as Root curls into herself in just her bra and panties. She does that sometimes, comes home with a fresh welt on her thigh, a gash on her arm. “What the hell happened?” Shaw used to ask, and Root would just look at her wounds like she’d only just noticed them, like she didn’t even feel a thing.

“Oh,” She’d say. Just, “oh”.

 Shaw used to be incredulous that Root didn’t understand the basics of first aid – “clean your goddamn wounds, Root” – but not so much anymore, now that she knows it’s not so much recklessness as it is a kind of disconnect from her body. Root has expressed it before - that having a body is like caring for a piece of external hard drive, equipment to be maintained, a nuisance for the most part; and Shaw has become better at noticing when Root’s not _on,_ exactly, when she sort of forgets the kinds of things bodies require that Shaw herself takes totally for granted.

“Eaten anything today?” Shaw asks and she immediately sees her phone light up with a text – no doubt The Machine with a precise report of Root’s caloric intake, like that’s supposed to get her off the hook for letting Root behave like Her own personal action figure.

“Mm,” Root just says into a pillow, half asleep. Shaw breathes through her nose. She puts her hand on Root’s back, scratches up and down a few times and Root arches her spine a little, sighing contentedly at the touch. She moves to close the laptop but Root objects, “Keep it open,” she says, “please.”

“Get some sleep,” Shaw tells her, standing up to close the blinds. “I’m gonna go for a run. You and your robot friend better not pull any stunts that’ll get someone killed while I’m gone.”

“Aw, sweetie,” Root says through a yawn, “we’d never do anything without you here to join in on the fun.” Shaw gives her a look. Root scrunches her nose, “Well, almost never.”

 

It’s cold and damp out and Shaw’s lungs burn with every breath of the sharp air. She relishes it, has always relied heavily on the intense physicality she can force her body into enduring.

“8.3 miles,” A voice chirps in her ear when she rounds a corner and slows. “37.4 minutes.”

Her voice is not one Shaw recognizes – not the collage of automated syllables turned into words, but not the voice of a person she’s heard before either. It’s another one that She’s invented Herself, probably. She's gone through voices like wigs over the past few months, it seems, trying them on for size.

Shaw breathes in deeply, does not respond. She takes her headphones out of her ears and adjusts to the sounds of the city that surrounds her. She doesn't get the same thrill out of The Machine keeping tabs on her as Root does; doesn’t need it, either.

Which is perhaps why, when she spots a security camera on the corner of the street, she pauses and stares up at it, wonders if god’s in the mood for a chat.  

“Hey you,” she says, feeling a sudden itch of aggression, “wanna explain to me why you think it’s okay to let Root act like a one-woman army? I know you can hear me,” she says lowly, aware and indifferent to the few passersby that glance at her anxiously. “And I know you’ve got lots of other options now. Other bodies to do your bidding. So why don’t you start putting some of your new recruits to work before you work your precious analog interface to death.”

The camera stares back at her, blinking its red light, dumb and cold. A machine. Shaw huffs and tugs her headphones from her ears, but presses one back in when she hears Her voice coming through.

“What was that?”

“I’m sorry,” says Her voice clearly.

Shaw squares her shoulders, unprepared for the instant deference. Conflict, she can handle. Sincerity is a whole other animal.

“You should be,” she says lamely, half-hoping to leave it at that.

“I am aware of the physical and emotional requirements of analog interface.”

 “Oh,” says Shaw with a snort, “you’re aware are you.”

“Yes.”

Shaw blinks. It bothers her that she can’t tell if She is being obtuse or derisive. “Well,” she says, “Is that all?”

Nothing. Shaw thinks of all the times she has found Root awake in the middle of the night, all bright eyed and annoyingly animated in the midst of a series of whispers with The Machine. Her silence now only strengthens Shaw’s theory that Root could talk a fucking corpse’s ear off given the chance. Does She actually talk back, Shaw wonders, although she’s certain that She does; Root has come away from conversations with Her both teary eyed and maniacally gleeful. She is the only other entity in the world that Root seems to let have that effect on herself, a thought Shaw refuses to dwell on.

Perhaps it’s just Shaw that’s being obtuse here. Wouldn’t be the first time. Doesn’t mean she’s going to do anything about it, necessarily. Meaningful conversations (which seems to be the direction this is heading) have always been extremely low on her list of priorities, and one with an artificial super intelligence is no exception. She does, however, wish she had the ability to pretend that she does not understand the scope of Her existence, that She wasn’t so intricately entwined in Root’s identity, and, by effect, her own.    

“She does not wish for there to be another analog interface,” The Machine admits eventually, a voice in the dark that startles Shaw into the present, “I am afraid she has taken on the burden of Admin.”

“Care to elaborate,” Shaw says blankly when She leaves it at that.

“Admin was afraid of the future,” She says, “of how I would change it. But, she was never afraid of me.”

“That’s putting it lightly,” notes Shaw dryly.

“But now,” She goes on, “I fear she has taken on Admin’s anxieties about our role in the world.”

Shaw shivers at having stayed still so long in the cold air. She thinks about Finch: the man who created god. That dude was an aneurism waiting to happen right up to his last moments. Shaw learned to respect him for the most part; but she sure as hell never envied him.

She turns to go, the thought unsettling her in a way she doesn’t really wish to ponder, but The Machine’s voice sounds again, “I was taught that I love her,” She just says, “But I do not know what that means, yet.”

Her words come out succinctly, as though it’s a thought she’s been mulling over for a while, words waiting to be said. Shaw bristles. She can’t quite fathom the way machines learn, and doesn’t pretend to, but she’s always been fairly confident that a few pre-recorded tapes and lines of complex code will never have the ability to teach things to _feel_. She imagines Her scouring the archives of human love – poems, movies, letters; whatever trite ways people feel the need to express the kind of crap she’s less than accustomed to - analyzing and reanalyzing, trying to get a grasp on a concept so fraught with illogicality, it’s hard to believe it exists at all. Shaw knows what that’s like. She thinks of when she was young, watching people cry and laugh and feel things so strongly all the fucking time, and inadvertently teaching herself to read people like books. It became a useful skill, when she needed it. Although, sometimes it doesn’t feel very useful at all.

“Okay,” Shaw hardly manages to say, followed by a stretch of silence that she has no intention of filling.

“I do not wish to hurt her,” She goes on. “I wish to protect her. But she is my analog interface. And there are too many variables to consider. This complicates things.”

Shaw looks out at the city around her; all the flickers of lights and streams of electricity flowing through it. Then, she looks at the eye of the security camera, the steady, blinking light, and wonders how a being so tied up with the rest of the world can be so fundamentally hung up on a single concept like _love_. She feels a sudden, poignant burst of anger deep inside her chest.

“Of course it’s complicated,” She says. “But you’re an artificial super intelligence. You learn, what, thousands of times faster than us rat-brained humans? So figure it out.” Shaw makes a conscious effort to uncurl her fists, breathes in sharply through her nose.

“You’re angry.”

“Yes.”

“At me?”

“Yes – no,” Shaw starts. She’s uncertain as to what this conversation has turned into and her initial instinct is to simply stop having it. Instead, she just says, “At all of us, I guess.”

 

At the hotel, Root is still asleep by the time Shaw gets back, and still after she showers and orders room service. She keeps the lights off and settles on the edge of the bed, towel drying her hair while she flips through the few channels the hotel’s T.V. offers until she finds a rerun of Vanishing Point and tries to remember the last time she drove a car so fast she felt like she was flying.

After a while, Root stirs beside her, awake.

“Got you a sandwich,” Shaw tells her.

Root yawns and shivers, grabbing Shaw’s hoodie from the floor beside her to pull her arms through. “Time is it?” she asks groggily.

“Just after 10,” Shaw tells her, “You only slept for a few hours.”

“Felt like a long time,” Root sighs and picks up the sandwich.

Shaw turns her attention back to the television, aware that Root gets weirded out about being watched while she eats sometimes. On screen, a 440 Magnum races down a long stretch of road. Shaw doesn’t remember the last time she drove that fast, but she does remember the first time: a kid on her father’s lap, legs too small to reach the pedals so he did it for her while she held onto the wheel, “faster, baba”. Her mother was furious.

Root must catch her smiling because she smirks at Shaw, “Have I ever told you how endearing your fondness for cars is?”

Shaw grins through a bite of her burger. “Dunno,” she says, “But you’ve definitely expressed your ‘fondness’ in other ways.”

“Yeah,” Root smiles contentedly at the memory, “that was definitely most fun I’ve ever had driving across state lines.”

“Fun?” Shaw snorts, “We got pulled over in a stolen vehicle because you were giving me road head and wouldn’t let me come until I was going at least 50 over the speed limit.”

Root gives her a look. Shaw concedes, “Yeah, okay, that was pretty fun.”

From the corner of her eye, Shaw sees Root pick up the sandwich, then sigh with relief as she puts it back down without another bite, The Machine probably having informed her that she’s reached her required nutritional intake. She flops back down on the bed beside Shaw, poking at her thigh with her toe after a long moment.

“Come here,” she says pointedly and Shaw puts the empty tray on the floor, mutes the T.V., and crawls up Root’s body until they’re face to face.

“Hi,” Root says.

“Hey.”

Shaw looks at her face for a moment before kissing her, just soft brushes of lips, mouths open wide like they’re trying to breathe each other in. They do that for a while, the lazy and unhurried type of kissing that neither of them likes to indulge in too frequently. It’s nice now though, Shaw thinks, a moment she wouldn’t mind stretching out for a while.

“Missed you,” Root says after a bit, a soft tumble of words. Shaw nips gently at her bottom lip, a bite that slowly increases in pressure until Root makes a soft, whining sound.

“You should stay a while, then,” Shaw just says, shifting so that her head is on Root’s chest, body slotted between her legs.

“Mm,” Root hums noncommittally, a hand stroking over Shaw’s back. Shaw watches her eyes shift. Root frowns, slightly and looks at Shaw, “Feeling better, sweetie?” Shaw looks at her questioningly. Root shrugs, “She’s asking.”

Shaw rolls her eyes, but it’s half-hearted. She doesn’t answer. Root’s fingers are tracing over her scars when she says, “don’t be like that”, and Shaw looks pointedly at the open laptop beside the bed. 

 “If this is Her trying to get us to have a conversation,” says Shaw, knowing full well that She can hear her but refusing to address Her directly, “you can tell Her to fuck off.”

Root _tsks_ , “I’ll check in later,” she says. Then to Shaw, “She got the message, Sameen.”

Her fingers are still moving over the scars on her back, tracing and retracing, and Shaw thinks about all the other times this has happened before: all the simulations and all the memories before and after Samaritan of letting Root touch her like this. There are only a few that she thinks are real; but, there’s really no telling either way, and she knows from experience that trying to sort it out will only make her violently sick or violently angry.

“Shaw,” says Root, when Shaw tries to rid her shoulders of their tension, rolling over so that they’re lying side by side. “ _Is_ there a conversation we need to be having?”

Shaw rolls her eyes half-heartedly. She knows that if she told Root to fuck off too, she’d respect that. No harm, no foul. Part of her wants to grab those zipties she saw peeking out of Root's purse, let Root find a miakeshift gag and fuck her 'till anything resembling conversation was nearly impossible. But she also knows that in a few days, or a few weeks if they’re lucky, there will be another relevant number, and another after that, until one of them slips up, gets themselves killed. She does not recall ever being so wary about death – her own, or anyone else’s. 

“You ever imagined you’d be doing this?” She asks vaguely, wanting to rid herself of the discomfort, “The whole, saving people for a living thing?”

“Honestly?” Root nearly scoffs, shifting to lie on her back next to Shaw, “I thought I’d be dead by now. No use imagining a future I didn’t think I was ever going to get. But if I had,” she smiles darkly, turning her head toward Shaw, “there’s no way in hell I would have considered this as a possibility.”

“Yeah,” Shaw admits eventually, “me too, actually.” She sighs, looks at Root, “what about now – the future, I mean – do you think about it?”

Root sighs, shifting to look at Shaw somewhat uneasily. She glances at the laptop, as though she’s suddenly catching on.

“All the time,” she admits, “Not necessarily mine, though. It’s almost funny,” she says dismally, “that I’ve not only survived this long in a world full of people I used to think so little of – but now I spend every day trying to ensure their well being.”

Shaw looks to Root, whose gaze is fixed on the ceiling, stuck in a thought. “You know,” she says, frowning, “you deserve a future too, Root.”

Root looks uneasy at that. “I just - ” she pauses, unsure. “I don’t want to be responsible for screwing this all up. Harry and John – they died for this. And The Machine, she hardly made it out alive, and even now She’s struggling. If even one thing goes wrong -” she says, moving her hand to the spot behind Shaw’s ear, touching it lightly, “I just, don’t want everything that’s happened to be for nothing.”

“You’re not responsible for the entire world, Root,” Shaw says, “there are things even She can’t control.”

She glances at the laptop, wonders if theirs is the only conversation She is listening to, what other times and places she is occupying Herself with – a whole slew of realities in Her possession. Shaw moves her head to Root’s chest, presses her fingers to the wound on her shoulder, the one that was never quite the right shape in the simulations.

“Even if this did end up being a simulation, if none of this is real,” She says quietly, a muffled string of words into soft skin. She does not know which of them she is talking to, exactly, but the breath Root releases makes her think it doesn’t really matter. “It wouldn’t have been for nothing.”

Root lets her take her hand and study it with her own: the creases in her palms, the soft veins and clipped nails. Shaw curls Root’s hand into a loose fist, presses her lips to the sharpest parts of her knuckles. Root doesn’t say anything, but Shaw feels her breathing easier against her, her body calming itself. 

Across the room, the single light of the laptop’s camera remains shining in the dark: steady, blinking.

**Author's Note:**

> title from Sleeping at Last.


End file.
